Earl R. Wasserman

Earl Wasserman's The Finer Tone (c1953) is still a hallmark in the reading of John Keats' poetry. The forty-page essay on "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is itself a triumph of close textual analysis. Similarly the other essays (on "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "The Eve of St. Agnes," "Lamia," and "Ode to a Nightingale") set high marks for other readers to aim for. In fact, I think that one of the most interesting features of the book is its demonstration of the methods and values of the "New Criticism"—when, by the way, it was still relatively New. Curiously, it also pointed the way beyond the New Criticism.

Wasserman certainly defended the autonomy of the poem, exploring the patterns of sound, imagery, syntax, and thematic motifs that Keats so carefully developed. At the same time, he drew unapologetically on Keats' earlier works and his letters to confirm the thematic patterns he found, or at least to provide terminology for explaining them.

For example, in his discussion of "Grecian Urn," he clarifies what Keats' means by the repeated use of the word "happy" (e.g., "Ah, happy, happy boughs!" "More happy love! More happy, happy love!") by referring to external sources. He begins by looking back to the earlier, and less successful, poem Endymion (the passage beginning "Wherein lies happiness?"). He also cites a letter to a friend in which Keats recalled this passage as "a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a truth...a kind of Pleasure Thermometer." The pattern of imagery in the ode is perfectly parallel with this "pleasure thermometer" in Endymion, a kind of Platonic progression from nature (the boughs, the leaf-fringed legend) to art (“heard melodies are sweet”) to friendship or love. At the apex of the pleasure thermometer is what Keats called in another passage in Endymion “the very bourne of heaven,” finite happiness merging with a sense of the infinite. So, though these external citations are not necessary to understand the autonomous pattern in the ode, Wasserman uses them to clarify or substantiate his description of Keats’ movement in the poem. In stanza three it rises to the “Dionyisian intensity that marks the progress of the poet from mild wonderment to selfless ecstasy.” In the last two stanzas, the movement traces both a withdrawal from this intensity and a further heightening of the poet's role.

Such citations are so apt that one’s reading of each of the poems is thereafter, quite naturally, influenced by this understanding of Keats’s pervasive thought and recurrent thematic patterns. Of course, Wasserman is giving a close textual reading of each poem independently. I think he does so even more effectively, for example, than Cleanth Brooks did in his essay on Keats in the famous New Critical volume, The Well-Wrought Urn. But Wasserman is also, at the same time, moving beyond each single poem to Keats’ work as a whole. The Finer Tone focuses on only five poems, but actually it provides an overview of the works of John Keats as a whole, including both poetry and critical comments made in letters to friends. Northrop Frye, side-stepping the New Critics, had already given such a bold, comprehensive reading to the works of William Blake in Fearful Symmetry. The next step, as Frye was later to demonstrate in his Anatomy of Criticism, was to apply such an analysis of recurrent images and thematic motifs to, say, a genre, or a group of contemporaries, or to a period of literary development; thence, eventually, to literature as a whole. Wasserman only tiptoes in that direction in a few hints at Keats’ place among his contemporary poets.

The success of his New Critical reading of these five poems is apparent even yet in that new historicists, deconstructionists, and post-structuralists use his work as their jumping off point, or sometimes as their point of attack. What I think is more important about The Finer Tone is that it rescued Keats from impressionistic critics who had extolled his “sensitivity” and “sensibility” without understanding the intellectual depth and structural complexity of his masterpieces. Wasserman wrote in an age in which John Donne’s paradoxes and ambiguities were being idolized, and “metaphysical” poetry being held up as the standard for twentieth century imitators, an age in which Keats was still being sentimentalized as an “apostle of beauty.” What he accomplished was to show how the analytical methods of the New Criticism could, likewise, be used to examine the poetic genius of the nineteenth-century Romantics. His afterword concludes with this point:

"Wordsworth worked out his pattern; Shelley his; Keats his. I suspect that our failure to grasp as total and integrated experiences such works as Shelley’s 'Adonais' or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India results from our not having succeeded as yet in bringing to these works the proper controlling cosmos, for each cosmos is the creation of the author. Instead of describing our personal responses or lamenting that Wordsworth is not Donne, we need to re-examine the Romantics and their successors in order to discover whether within each one’s frame of things he created, not Romantic art of Victorian art—not works inside or outside a 'tradition'—but art. Something of this sort I have tried to do in these chapters for Keats."

Within the next decade or so, the critical world took up Wasserman’s challenge and followed his example: on the one hand, rigorously applying New Critical methods to works well beyond Donne and the metaphysicals, and on the other hand, using close reading of archetypes and mythic patterns to discover each “cosmos” that is “the creation of [each] author.” From the New Critical autonomy of the individual poem to the autonomy of each writer’s own “cosmos,” ultimately to the autonomy of literary art: Wasserman pointed the way.… (mer)